Obama's Dour Vision

How much change do we really need?

By

Daniel Henninger

Updated Nov. 6, 2008 12:01 a.m. ET

Barack Obama's victory speech Tuesday night had grace notes. He wants to pull away from the "partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long." Well past due on that one.

ENLARGE

Dorothea Lange

He praised a party of Abraham Lincoln "founded on the values of self-reliance, individual liberty and national unity. Those are values we all share." And the way such values are kept alive is by a victor's thoughtful mention of them. His remarkable win was truly "not hatched in the halls of Washington," a fact that contributed much to his support from an electorate disillusioned with the federal institutions at both ends of Washington.

That said, it might be useful to ask at this early stage what, precisely, is President-elect Obama's understanding of the American idea? What I take away from the victory speech is that his vision of America is fairly depressing, a lot more dour than my sense of America in 2008.

Throughout the campaign, Barack Obama ran against the "failed" presidency of George Bush -- his "failed" economic policies, his "failed" war in Iraq and so on. In his victory speech, though, Mr. Obama appears to be describing a generalized failure of America itself.

President-elect Obama ran on a campaign of hope, portraying conditions in America as worse than they are. Wonder Land columnist Daniel Henninger speaks with Kelsey Hubbard. (Nov. 6)

It emerged in the first sentence: "If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer."

He presumably is referring to the election of the first African-American president, an achievement. Is it true to say, though, that this alone proves that "the dream of our founders is still alive in our time?"

Many phrases and passages in the speech suggest an America in a kind of collapse. "It's been a long time coming." "The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep." He believes his campaign volunteers "proved that more than two centuries later, a government of the people by the people and for the people has not perished from this Earth. This is your victory."

A benign explanation would be that either Mr. Obama's friend Ted Sorensen or his talented young speech writer needs a tutorial in the perils of over-writing. This untethered rhetoric is Sorensian overkill.

Harder to account for is the persistence of Mr. Obama's grim vision of where we stand now. This was nowhere more evident than in the speech's passages with "Yes we can," which he now equates with the "American creed." "Yes we can" was appropriate as a campaign punch line. Here, however, it punctuated points in U.S. history that Mr. Obama clearly sees as analogous to our current status and challenge: the "despair in the dust bowl and depression across the land," the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the day "a preacher from Atlanta" delivered his We Shall Overcome speech.

The overwhelming reason Barack Obama won this election is because voters, in their pedestrian way, want him to restart the stalled, damaged economy, which for all the "Depression" talk is nowhere near the 20% unemployment rates and low living standards then. The election came his way the night of Sunday Sept. 14, when the financial crisis exploded. Before that, he and Sen. McCain were in a virtual tie, and the Democratic nominee should have been well ahead of a candidate tied to the out-of-favor Republicans. Doubts among undecideds were holding down Mr. Obama's numbers. The markets' disintegration and loss of confidence in the nation's economic stewards gave him his win.

In what way is this a mandate for "change" similar to the vast economic restructurings of the dust-bowl years and social legislation of the mid-1960s? Yet again in the speech: "I will ask you join in the work of remaking this nation the only way it's been done in America for two-hundred and twenty-one years -- block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand."

This takes us well past George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Remake this nation? Calloused hand by calloused hand?

Any nation is a work in progress, with problems worthy of public attention. None in the U.S. -- none -- tops the collapse of the urban public-school system. It is a little insulting, though, to imply that the America of people and institutions -- private enterprise and public officials -- who've worked the past 40 years to move the nation's living standards forward somehow don't measure up to "the founders' dream."

When in this context he asserts, "Our union can be perfected," one pauses. Efforts to achieve the abstraction of national perfectibility can prove a dicey proposition.

An alternative explanation for all this would be that Barack Obama is given to grandiosity such as the famous Greek columns in a Denver stadium. Among the Obama supporters who made his case to me the past year, I doubt many would say this level of grandiosity was what they had in mind amid constant assurance that he is a moderate, pragmatic man.

Mr. Obama's messianism may be setting him up for a fall. It might make sense between now and his Inaugural Address for the president-elect to lower his flight path. Among the images evoked by Greek columns is the myth of Icarus. The Founding Fathers' idea of "change" was in fact more modest than Mr. Obama's, a reality worth pondering lest he take his followers on a ride toward the sun.

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.